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He's talking about the BAR and the Thompson I think, both of which saw limited to no use in the Great War. I think a WW1 RTS could be pretty groovy. I'd love to see a Total War game based on it in fact.

Total War focuses on set battles, while World War I focused on fronts. Even the key set battle of the Western Front (Verdun, imo) lasted months and months and had the strategic objective of attrition. Other battles are named after broad fronts that stretched for miles.

Don't get me wrong, I could see a World War I strategy game (if there isn't one, I'm not sure), I just think it would be a macro-level game rather than a micro-level game. Rather than micro-managing every soldier's position and focusing on tactical maneuvering, you would manage logistics, supplies, and distribute manpower along the front then carefully plan your assaults and watch it play out.

He's talking about the BAR and the Thompson I think, both of which saw limited to no use in the Great War. I think a WW1 RTS could be pretty groovy. I'd love to see a Total War game based on it in fact.

Total War focuses on set battles, while World War I focused on fronts. Even the key set battle of the Western Front (Verdun, imo) lasted months and months and had the strategic objective of attrition. Other battles are named after broad fronts that stretched for miles.

Don't get me wrong, I could see a World War I strategy game (if there isn't one, I'm not sure), I just think it would be a macro-level game rather than a micro-level game. Rather than micro-managing every soldier's position and focusing on tactical maneuvering, you would manage logistics, supplies, and distribute manpower along the front then carefully plan your assaults and watch it play out.

The only one I can think of is a Paradox game called "Victoria", but it's at the very tail end of the game and since it's a Paradox grand strategy game it blows.

I think people like WWII as a setting for video games because it has such clear heroes and villains. That kind of narrative simplicity is lacking in most wars. It's hard to find a greater real-world evil than Hitler and Nazi Germany.

I'd say that's a very western point of view. If you look at what happened in the eastern front during the WWII, lines between heroes and villains are very muddy at best.

__________________
"God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,
and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and
Saturday."
-Sir William Bragg

I think people like WWII as a setting for video games because it has such clear heroes and villains. That kind of narrative simplicity is lacking in most wars. It's hard to find a greater real-world evil than Hitler and Nazi Germany.

I'd say that's a very western point of view. If you look at what happened in the eastern front during the WWII, lines between heroes and villains are very muddy at best.

Well, I am referring to how it is perceived in the popular consciousness. The Allies did their share of heinous things, but they were the "good guys" because the Nazis were just so, so bad. Hitler is the perfect villain, with his Holocaust and his vision of a German Reich over all of Europe (and perhaps the world.) The Allies fought for "freedom"--what higher cause could there be? The devil is, of course, in the details, but if you ignore the details, the European theater of WWII is, as I said, an extremely simple narrative.

Contrast this with WWI where you had a bunch of European monarchs throwing bodies at each other in a prolonged and pointless pissing match.

The Americans tried to find a moral reason to join the war but that's because they had absolutely no reason to join except to prove that their soldiers could fight too. I think what sums up the first World War greater than anything else is the number of casualties under November 11 before 11:00 am (i.e., when everyone knew there would be a cease fire in a few hours but the world powers continued to throw troops at each other just because they could).

I disagree that Wilson was an imperialist. Racist perhaps, but his whole thing was about self-determination. He had to justify the carve up of the Ottoman Empire that he knew the French and British were going to do anyway in terms that wouldn't contradict his principle of national self-determination. Obviously, the United States never signed the treaty of Versailles, but I'm not sure if we were considering taking any territory in the Middle East anyway (we were offered the mandate of Armenia, which was eastern Turkey and the Caucasus Mountains).